The Undertaker's Daughter (Ilka #1)(22)

“You’re very welcome to go out and look at him,” Ilka said, well knowing she would have to pull out all three of the refrigerator drawers, because she didn’t know where Artie had put him.

“There was a bag close to where he was assaulted, and our techs found his fingerprints on it,” said Officer Doonan, the younger of the two. “We brought along his belongings.”

Ilka nodded hesitantly and remembered what Artie had said about the expense of taking in deceased homeless. Maybe that problem was solved? “I’ll make sure his belongings are taken care of.” She tried to remember the code for the garage. “Why did he disappear?”

The officers followed her past the preparation room. They kept discreetly in the background when she punched the code in to unlock the door. The black coffin was gone. In its place was the plainer one that had been standing up against the wall, trimmed and ready to go. Suddenly Ilka realized there must be another room where the deceased were placed after being embalmed and laid into a coffin. She thought about the door between the preparation room and the door out to the garage.

“Mike Gilbert was a seventeen-year-old boy back then, or maybe he’d just turned eighteen,” Officer Thomas said. “The way I remember it, he and Ashley had been going together a few months when it happened.”

“Ashley?” Ilka held the door for them.

“A girl from here in town. She was a year ahead of him in school, a real head-turner. And Mike wasn’t anything special.” The way he said this made Ilka think he’d turned his head for a look at her a few times himself.

“The afternoon it happened, they’d planned to meet after school down at the lake, at the south end of town. It was freezing. I couldn’t understand what they were doing down there.”

They reached the refrigerator.

“Later we found out they met there when they wanted to be sure they were alone. Mike had a little sister, so it was their hideout, guess you could say. There’s a little fishing cabin up on the cliff by the lake; they had blankets and a few sleeping bags stowed away there. Afterward Mike admitted they’d smoked pot and had sex; then he’d left a few hours later for work. She was found on the shore, at the bottom of the cliff. But he claims she was still alive when he left her, still in the cabin.”

“Did you think he pushed her?”

Officer Thomas shook his head. “First we thought she’d slipped on the ice. Some places around here it’s hard to see in the winter where Lake Michigan ends and the beach begins. Unfortunately, there are way too many serious accidents on the lake, and not only in winter. But the dirt on her clothes indicated she fell from above, even though there’s heavy underbrush along the cliff up by the cabin. You don’t just step off into empty space there. And the next day, like we said, Mike came into the station and admitted he and Ashley had been at the cabin. He insisted she was alive when he left, and her phone was in her pants pocket; we could see she’d sent a message to her father at four thirty. That gave Mike an alibi, because he showed up at work at four, and his boss and others at the shop confirmed he’d been there all the time. He was our main suspect, though, but we never managed to charge him. And then suddenly one day he was gone. We haven’t seen him since, and that sort of supported what we all thought we knew. That he’d done it. But what happened, and how he managed to slip out of town, I don’t know. He just disappeared, and that’s one way to admit you’re guilty.”

Now the younger officer asked, “But you didn’t have any leads when he disappeared?”

Officer Thomas shook his head. “Not even one. He left his phone in his room, but we put a wiretap on his mother’s phone just in case he called home anyway. No luck. He didn’t make any cash withdrawals, and his mother says he couldn’t have had more than ten or fifteen dollars on him when he left. We started thinking he was dead too. In a lot of ways, it resembles a case from 1988, where a young man from Milwaukee disappeared the same way. Though he wasn’t suspected of murder. He was going to visit a friend but never showed up. The police thought he’d run into a serial killer who later was sentenced for killing several young men in Wisconsin.”

“But now you believe Mike Gilbert came back?” Ilka pulled out the top drawer—old Mrs. Norton. Gilbert was in the middle drawer, and Ilka stepped back to give the two officers room.

Officer Thomas’s face changed expression when he pulled the steel tray out to view the battered corpse. Artie hadn’t worked on the deceased, since there was no money for embalming or reconstructing the battered face, and the body was still covered with blood and dirt from where he was found.

The policeman stepped back. “If we hadn’t identified him from fingerprints, it would’ve been nearly impossible.”

The young man had a full beard and head of hair; splotches of dried blood clung to his head. His face was puffed up badly, and both eyes were swollen shut. It was indeed difficult to recognize a face so badly beaten as this one.

Why am I staring down at this? Ilka thought. The officer shook his head and pushed the tray back in again. She hadn’t intended to look. And it did her no good to see someone in such bad shape. Thirty years old, and beaten to death.

Shit! she said to herself. Not so much because the dead young man lying below her bedroom had probably murdered a girl, but while alive he had possibly been on the run most of his adult life, and now he lay in her funeral home, a shattered wreck that no one wanted anything to do with. Even if she had to pay Artie herself, she decided that at the very least he would be washed off before being interred. She followed the two officers back.